Discourses of Mobility: Institutions, Everyday Lives and Embodiment

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.

Freedom in mundane mobilities: caravanning in Denmark

“…Flamm and Kaufmann, 2006;Doughty and Murray, 2014;Sheller and Urry 2000;Freudendal-Pedersen, 2009), providing in theory freedom to go wherever one wants, whenever one wants (Hagman, 2003;Jensen, 1999). The notion of individualised automobility is closely connected to characterisations of contemporary Western societies as hyperautomobile (Freund and Martin, 2007), where daily transport becomes highly individualised and people travel further and more frequently.…”

“…Furthermore, domestic caravanning in Denmark is often undertaken in the close companionship of one's family members, friends and other caravanners, as opposed to an individualistic mode. The experiences 3 people have with these mundane spaces are vital in constituting mobile behaviours (Doughty and Murray, 2014), or as Featherstone (1992: 160) suggests; 'everyday life is the life-world which provides the ultimate ground from which springs all our conceptualizations, definitions and narratives'. As such, the objectives of this paper are two-fold; firstly, our primary objective is, through in-situ interviews with families caravanning in Denmark, to challenge existing dominant discourses surrounding the subject of freedom within leisure and tourism, in order to disrupt representations of freedom as occurring through exoticised, masculinised and individualised practices.…”

‘Moving to stay in the same place?’ Academics and theatrical artists as exemplars of the ‘mobile middle’

“…While the circumstances of some of the academic participants, especially senior ones, are economically stable, our empirical material also provides support for Kim's (2009) thesis about the emergence of a 'proletarisation of academic labour'. Simultaneously, however, our insights 32 suggest that the widely shared belief of academics and theatrical artists in the opportunities brought about by mobility demands and in the possibility that work-and career-related aspirations might yet become fulfilled, shows, on an imaginary level, parallels between the 'mobile middle' and the 'elites' (see also Baerenholdt, 2013;Doughty and Murray, 2014). Participants' narratives combine an awareness and, in some cases, experience of economic and social insecurity with a sense of faith and hope for the future.…”

“…Hence, movement and possibly concomitant transition and transformation do not only occur in physical spaces but also -and often simultaneously -in imaginary, virtual sites (Daskalaki, 2012). Doughty and Murray (2014) also remind us that how movement and its consequences are imagined at an individual level is influenced by the 'rights to mobility' discourses that pervade western society. Citizens who experience mobility as an autonomous choice appear to be in a position that enables them to gain overall from mobility, conceived of as potentiality (see also Kim, 2010).…”

The intersection of social protection and mobilities: a move towards a ‘Practical Utopia’ research agenda

“…Finally, mobilities studies is increasingly focusing on different politics of mobility. Hence, the question of how movement, power and politics are interwoven and what this means for everyday life are being placed on the agenda (Baerenholdt 2013;Doughty and Murray 2016), as for example in works on the forced motionlessness of detainees or refugees, or -relatedly, on forced 'repatriation' through deportation (De Genova and Nathalie 2010;Merriman 2015, 38ff.). To avoid a romanticisation of movement, scholars sensitive to such traps have promoted a 'regimes-of-mobility approach' (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013;Baker 2016).…”